Too much fun already, it's nearly Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 20)! Me pirate name be Captain John Rackham, arrrr, according to this quiz! Captain, arr, we're, arrrr, about, arrrr, to hit a reef, arrrr. No one but the captain can say arrrr.

Actually, it's not. Party Girl was.
I helped launch the first official full-length movie premiere in 1995 in my offices in Seattle. The film was broadcast to several hundred people worldwide over a CUSeeMe reflector at Point of Presence Company's offices in downtown and then a few minutes, it was projected at The Egyptian in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Parker Posey was in our offices to hit the start button on the broadcast.

I was one cog in a larger set of wheels that involved the Seattle International Film Festival, Film.com (now part of Real Networks), First Look Releasing, and the film's producers, as well as another online development company and a CUSeeMe consultant who also worked for the government down in Texas.

The launch was shown on NBC Nightly News in a five-minute segment on the bottom of the Sunday broadcast that week. If you don't believe me, we had witnesses -- we invited a bunch of folks up for the cameras. Amazon.com confirms my story. You can also read this first-person account from Quinn "The Eskimo!".

I asked Apple executive Phil Schiller several weeks ago whether when he said that when you download music from the iTunes store you "own" it, whether that meant you could sell it. I wrote up his remarks here, as there wasn't precisely a place to fit them in a column I wrote for The Seattle Times around the same time. His fundamental statement: There are always "certain boundaries on your rights, just as on everything I own." For instance, "I can own a car but that doesn't give me the right to speed 100 mph in it."This article at News.com describes how a Web developer tested the theory that he owned iTunes music by trying to sell it on eBay. No dice. Violates eBay's auction agreement (see Comment below).

Seattle journalist Glenn Fleishman writes the Mac 911 and Private I columns at Macworld, and co-hosts its podcast. He also contributes regularly to the Economist, Boing Boing, MIT Technology Review, TidBITS, and Six Colors. Previously: the editor and publisher of The Magazine and host of the podcast The New Disruptors. Banner picture of Carl Montford's hand, taken by yours truly in his home letterpress shop. Subscribe via RSS or Twitter to a feed of most of my articles published everywhere.

RT @daveweigel: The GOP-run House feels like one of those lawnmowers you have to pull the chain on three times before starting.